Deputies make arrest in decades-old cold cases in Stafford County, Fairfax County
STAFFORD COUNTY, Va. (DC News Now) — Deputies with the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) arrested a man accused of killing two women in Virginia in the 1980s, nearly four decades after the murders.
On Nov. 14, 1986, 32-year-old Jaqueline Lard was working at Mount Vernon Realty in the 300 block of Garrisonville Rd. SCSO said she was last seen at 9 p.m. that night as the business closed — she never made it home.
The next morning, businesses in the area were preparing to open for the day and found a crime scene at the realty office, indicating a struggle. Lard and her car were both missing. Detectives processed the scene, collecting blood and other evidence.
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Two days after Lard’s disappearance, on Nov. 16, two kids were playing in a wooded area in Woodbridge when they found a body under a pile of discarded carpet. Stafford detectives joined with Prince William County detectives and the FBI to process the scene.
Officers identified the body as Lard.
Investigators later found Lard’s car abandoned in Fairfax County on Dec. 18, 1986.
Over the years, detectives from federal and state agencies followed up on leads and conducted interviews, gradually eliminating suspects and persons of interest.
The FBI created a task force with the SCSO, Prince William County Police Department, FBI and DEA. Though DNA was collected from the evidence, repeated searches of the Virginia and National DNA Databanks failed to identify the killer.
After leads were exhausted, the investigation went cold — but evidence collected at the scene allowed investigators to identify a suspect 37 years later, SCSO stated in a Facebook post.
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Detective D.K. Wood with SCSO worked with Parabon NanoLabs, a company that provides DNA phenotyping. An analysis of the DNA linked Lard’s murder to another cold case: the unsolved 1989 murder of Amy Baker in Fairfax County.
The Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) said that Baker, who was 18 years old at the time, was visiting family in Falls Church on March 29, 1989. She started to head home to Stafford County around 8:30 p.m., but police said she never made it home.
A Virginia State Police trooper found Baker’s car by the road around 9:55 p.m. that night. It was unoccupied. The trooper saw the car in the same spot the next morning and had it towed, presuming that the car was abandoned.
Baker’s family reported her missing after she didn’t return home. Her mother found her car and searched it after learning that it had been towed.
On March 31, 1989, Baker’s family searched the area near where her car had been discovered and found her body “in a wooded area near the exit ramp from I-95 to Backlick Road in Springfield,” FCPD said.
Police determined that Baker’s car had run out of gas on the exit ramp. Detectives believed that she left her car to look for a gas station when she ran into the suspect. FCPD said that she was strangled and killed.
FCPD said that its Cold Case detectives had submitted forensic evidence from the scene to DNA Labs International in 2021, leading to the link to the case in Stafford County.
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On Dec. 14, 2023, a family name for the suspect was identified and detectives obtained a search warrant for DNA from Elroy Harrison, a 65-year-old Stafford County resident.
On March 4, Harrison was indicted by a Stafford County Grand Jury for the first-degree murder, abduction with the intent to defile and aggravated malicious wounding of Lard — as well as breaking and entering with the intent to commit murder.
He was arrested at his home on March 5 and held at the Rappahannock Regional Jail without bond.
FCPD detectives were working with the Fairfax County Office of the Commonwealth Attorney to also charge Harrison for Baker’s murder.
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